The Stuff of Democracy
How Understanding the Mind Supports Progressive Education
SOURCE: Viking
In his most recent book, The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker argues that language is one of many mental organs that shape our participation in a just and free society.
Steven Pinker makes an important contribution to the progressive tradition of educational theory with his latest book, The Stuff of Thought. Commonly identified with the American pragmatists, this progressive approach to education continues a line of argument established in Pinker’s previous books on the mind, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate.
Pinker reminds us that a diversity of cognitive systems both set the conditions for how we respond to uncertainty and how we learn. Applied to the social and political world, these observations suggest that in a culture devoted to participatory democracy and knowledge acquisition, we should foster self-corrective inquiry. We may be predisposed to learn about the objects in our world in certain ways, but we are nevertheless born prepared to learn. Pinker points out that this receptivity to education remains constant across all human beings in spite of our diverse patterns of DNA.
According to Pinker’s realism, we are anchored to a world of adaptation, wit, and social discourse. The growth of knowledge and science is grounded in noting an object, fixing reference to it or “tagging” it, and then engaging in the process of coming to understand the object in our world.
First and foremost, a formal education should teach us how to properly apply the categories that we are born to impose on what we sense.
In his conception, language is one mental organ among others that interacts with other senses such as our conception of space and time, our assessments of risk and probability, and our categorization of objects. Because these other intricate mental processes depend on interacting with other people in our social space, we see more clearly that minds must be unencumbered by tyrannical restraints, and that they should be nurtured and emboldened by wise policies that foster debate and discovery. Particularity democracy requires an understanding of the active mind. But the most essential policy would be one that supports these intellectual capabilities through education, beginning early in life.
First and foremost, a formal education should teach us how to properly apply the categories that we are born to impose on what we sense. As William James observed over a hundred years ago, we need to learn how to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. An educational policy that sets this goal would represent a renewal of the progressive approach to learning.
Ultimately, we will reap innumerable dividends from these policies because they act as an investment in an Enlightenment culture, a culture in which participation in the polity, not by the few but by many, is a normative goal; and a culture in which that participation is nurtured early on by harnessing our innate tendency to organize the objects in our world in a shared social space of comprehension and meaning. An investment in that kind of culture is an investment in the Enlightenment tradition on which this nation was founded by minds like Franklin and Jefferson—and from which this nation continues to progress by minds like Pinker.
Pinker is in the long tradition that dates back to Plato through the classical rationalists of the 17th century (e.g. Descartes, Leibniz); the primary focus is a recognition of the innateness of the human mind. Language is always the paradigmatic example, a la Chomsky in the 20th century: Without innate syntax wired into our brain biology, there would be no language acquisition. Pinker falls squarely within that tradition and is a staunch defender of its scientific validity.
But Pinker is also more than that. What makes this latest work important is that Pinker debunks extreme forms of rationalism within linguistics that endorse linguistic imperialism, claiming that language is all of human thought. The Stuff of Thought moderates this view of linguistic dominance. Pinker rightly notes, as many others have argued, that human thought is larger than just language acquisition. Language is a key to the vastness of the human mind, but it is nevertheless one among many other cognitive resources.
Pinker makes sure to emphasize that these cognitive systems connect us to the world, rather than separate us from events to which we are trying to adapt.
Similarly, the mind is far from the blank slate envisioned in classical empiricism. Chomsky and now Pinker are surely right about this. However, unlike Chomsky—and Jerry Fodor for that matter—Pinker is frankly empirical, but from a rationalistic perspective. Pinker’s view of the mind is close to that of Immanuel Kant. He argues throughout that our concepts of space, time, and causation are fundamental features of the mind. As Pinker puts it, “Kant was surely right that our minds ‘cleave the air’ with the concepts of space, time and causality” (p 253).
Pinker notes that there is abundant evidence of diverse forms of classifying tendencies that humans possess which set the foundations for our problem-solving abilities and then become expanded and extended through usage. We possess certain core concepts such as animacy and agency (the detection of the beliefs and desires of others), in addition to our senses of space, time, probability, and language—and together, these give rise to our worldview. In addition, these cognitive abilities are intertwined and utilized in even the most mundane everyday activities.
Pinker has always been enthusiastic about biology and ties language and other cognitive predilections to our biology, our evolution, and to our diverse forms of adaptation. The cognitive milieu, in addition to the cultural one, sets the context for human expression. Thus evolution does not hang on one cognitive feature, but provides us with a large toolbox of diverse kinds of cognitive abilities. Our responses to complex environments reflect the cognitive architecture and evolution that underlie our adaptation and organization of action.
Pinker makes sure to emphasize that these cognitive systems connect us to the world, rather than separate us from events to which we are trying to adapt. Moreover, our cognitive resources are tied to the fact that we are inherently social. The social milieu and the transactions between us reflect the mental machinations of our species.
We are also taxonomic animals. We categorize things, and we come prepared to discern events from a core orientation and perspective. The use of metaphor in our cognitive arsenal in categorizing events is fundamental to our semantic lexicon. Pinker engages the school of linguistics that emphasizes metaphor as the heart of human cognitive systems and he acknowledges the diverse roles that metaphor plays in our cognitive arsenal. They are, as Pinker rightly notes, “not simply literary garnishes but aids to reason” (p 253). Yet he also tweaks George Lakoff, the leading exponent of this school, for going “a wee bit too far” (p 247) when Lakoff claims that all thought is embedded in metaphor.
Understanding more fully the dynamic role categorization and metaphor play in our understanding of the world further emphasizes the necessity of cultivating each citizen’s awareness of how they comprehend the world.
Jay Schulkin is a Research Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and the Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University.
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